


Press Delete

by 26LetterstoBuildaWorld



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, First attempt at AO3, First foray into fandom, M/M, Reaper76 Week, how does this tagging system work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 16:35:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9333605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26LetterstoBuildaWorld/pseuds/26LetterstoBuildaWorld
Summary: They were erased, like obsolete lines in a code.-Reaper76 Week, Day 1: How We Were





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fan work in a long time, but I wanted to try to pick up fic again. Hopefully I can briefly entertain someone with this.
> 
> Written for Reaper76 Week, Day 1: How We Were.

  
  
Something _crnched_ beneath his boots, debris leftover from many other lives. The air was still, the rooms themselves tombs to preserve the dead past. It was often like this when visiting old Watchpoints, the private quarters of the agents tended to be undisturbed. Laboratories, server rooms, armories, anything of ‘official’ import had been picked over long ago. Only the private rooms were left alone, left to preserve little knickknacks and glimpses of the people who lived here.  
  
Gloved hands manually wrenched open the doors as he went, looking into red-tinted museum displays of ‘life’. Someone didn’t make their bed, someone didn’t pick up their trash, someone didn’t take their teddy bear before they left the base for the last time. The forlorn stuffed toy stared at him from it’s place laying against the pillow, it’s owner either dead or driven out with the rest of Overwatch.  
  
The Soldier stepped back, glanced at the name plate next to the door. It wasn’t a name he remembered. Once upon a time, it would have grated at him not to know. Now he knew there was a lot he hadn’t known. The owner of an abandoned teddy just one more thing on the list.  
  
His footsteps resumed, harsh and loud in the stillness. More incomplete pieces of agents in every room. An easel, a set of model cars, an alarmingly large collection of shoes spilling from a closet. A guitar. The last object made him pause, though once again the name on the door was one he didn’t know. A moment later he moved on.  
  
These walks always terminated in a similar place. Beyond the museum exhibit of The Everyday Overwatch Agent, came the wrongness. At the end of the hallway there were two more doors, two more names right across from one another. Every other bedroom was untouched, but these two would never be. These two were always disturbed, picked over, the sacred preservation of the past violated by the people who had killed them.  
  
_Morrison_ to the left, and _Reyes_ to the right.  
  
The left door was pulled open first, fingers finding the deep grooves in the metal left by the previous visitor. He knew what he’d find, or rather what he wouldn’t find. What neither of them would find.  
  
The room before him was perfect, in a clinically clean sort of way. There were no clothes, no decorations, no personal effects. Jack Morrison had been a neat person, but not to this extent. He still had _things_ that marked him as a living person. Even if they were stupid knickknacks that he picked up while traveling, even if it was just a rock that someone had handed him because it was pretty. These things were always neatly and orderly displayed with pride. This room couldn’t have _belonged_ to someone. Less than even a hotel or a hospital that at least tried to pretend, to have some semblance of life. Someone or someones had scrubbed away Overwatch’s commander from this place, just like every other Watchpoint he’d visited before. It didn’t hurt as much as it used to, and it wouldn’t hurt as much as opening the door across the hall.  
  
His gaze landed on a corner of the bed, rumpled as if a weight had been placed there and disturbed the otherwise immaculate space. He’d seen it before and he’d see it again, and he still wasn’t sure how to feel. A shake of his head, the man stepped from the room and let his fingers trail down the door. Gloved fingers couldn’t feel, but he saw how the leather dipped into the marks left by claws. He was stalling, though.  
  
The door seemed to loom with threat but he grit his teeth and dug in, hauling against mechanics that were meant to operate with power and electricity instead of the strain of muscles.  
  
It was still like a slap in the face, no matter how prepared he was. If Jack Morrison had been a neat person with a _few_ things, Gabriel Reyes had been a very precise sort of hurricane with _many_ things. And it _hurt_ to see how that organized chaos had been erased. Gone were the notebooks and clothes that seemed to materialize in every Watchpoint the man had inhabited, regardless of how long he actually stayed there. There were no stacks of data tablets on the floor, no piles of fabrics and clothing hogging the bed. It was as clinically scrubbed, empty, and dead as the room across the hall.  
  
There was a hesitance before one foot stepped in front of the other, carrying him into this sham of a bedroom. Gloves trailed across sheets and he sighed heavily as his bottom met the mattress. Sometimes he sat there for a few minutes, sometimes he lost track of time. Sometimes he didn’t sit at all. His thoughts briefly flicked to the bed in the other room, but then slid away.  
  
The silence was deafening here, the emptiness blinding. This wasn’t a day he could linger.  
  
The door was shut behind him as he left, sealing in the _wrong, dead, gone, erased._ The red-hued gaze went back to the opposite door again, the dents from his own fingers warped the metal in a way that almost camouflaged the deep scratches of the one who came before.  
  
The Soldier shook his head, walking again down the hall. Every door he passed was like that of the one marked ‘Morrison’, the marks of his visitation melding with the claws of someone else.  
  
There were never any claw marks on one door though.  
  
He was the only one who ever visited ‘Reyes’.


End file.
